I took a moment to put all the snippets of information together that I’d collected from everyone involved in Blue’s early life. He most likely started out being mistreated or abused, which scared him so badly that he cowered in fear when people tried to pet him. Then he was dropped off within steps of the Person County Animal Control gas chamber, placed in one of the cages for non-preferred dogs, and given three days to live without so much as a walk. Beach tagged him for rescue because he somehow, in that horrible situation, found the courage and grace to inch toward her and let her pet him. Turner brought him as a foster to her house, where he likely spent most of his time in a crate when he wasn’t having bleach applied to a rash on his tender, puppy skin. At some point he visited the POP-NC mobile clinic and was neutered by Dr. Royce, who recommended follow-up treatment that he failed to receive. Then he nearly missed his RV transport north and ended up arriving in Raleigh sometime around four o’clock in the afternoon, having been neither bathed nor brushed. He got placed in a cage on the RV, whose driver told me that Blue shared the confined space with a dog he didn’t know, and that one of them got sick somewhere along the ride. After sitting in that cage with vomit for at least some part of the sixteen and a half hours that it took the RV to drive to New Jersey, Blue found himself being cleaned up by the woman in the RV. Seconds after that, he’d been handed to me.
It is astonishing that Blue was friendly and good-natured at that moment when he first met me. Of course he was a little skittish and fearful. He deserved to be as downright enraged as I was.
I didn’t know the life stories of Izzy and Summer as I helped them begin their journeys north, except to say that they were both old enough and big enough, at about twenty-five pounds apiece, that they likely would have ended up in the gas chamber if Beach hadn’t pulled them from Person County Animal Control. When I met them at the local diner, they both still had most of the hair missing on their bellies—a telltale sign of a close shave at the POP-NC mobile clinic. Beach took my picture as we loaded them into the travel crates that I’d bought and arranged in my backseat, each one lined with fresh towels and a brandnew chew toy. Then she handed me everything she had for them, including their files, and she prepared to drive away with tears of joy in her eyes. The last thing she said was that she felt confident I would keep Izzy and Summer safe until Lulu’s Rescue could help me find them homes up North, just as they had with Blue.
Transporting dogs is a big responsibility—one that not all people involved in rescue take as seriously as they should. I had asked for advice in preparing to bring Izzy and Summer home, and I had heard horror stories about good-intentioned people having horrible accidents because they failed to transport dogs safely. I learned about people who had dogs fight in the backseats of cars, people who accidentally injured dogs by placing too many of them inside cars at once, even one woman who had a loose dog urinate all over the car’s steering wheel while she was trying to drive. I’d always let my dogs sit freely in my cars because that’s how they seemed the most comfortable, but for Izzy and Summer, I bought the plastic travel crates. I positioned them carefully in the backseat to make sure they were secure—in a way that I thought the dogs would feel better because they could see me and listen to my voice throughout the journey.
Blue didn’t have that luxury during his transport in the back of the RV, nor do most dogs who are moved from the South to the North.
I learned a lot about the real conditions that dogs in transport endure from Kyle and Pam Peterson, and Pam’s sister, Karen York. I called them to find out how they began moving dogs from the South to the North in 2004, and to ask about everything that they’ve learned since. They’ve certainly had enough practice in their company, which is now known as Peterson Express Transport Services. They delivered rescued dog No. 35,000 to a loving home sometime before New Year’s Day in 2012.
They started quite a bit like I was starting, by trying to do a good deed for just a couple of dogs. Pam worked for the Tennessee District Attorney’s Office in the early 1990s, and her job meant that she was always driving clear across the Volunteer State. She would constantly see stray dogs on the side of the road. She’d bring them to her house and try to find them homes.
When the Internet became popular, she started connecting with other dog lovers, and she realized there was a larger need for transports. She got to talking with Margo McHann of Good Dog Rescue in Memphis, who said she could find the dogs homes in the Northeast if Pam was willing to transport them. Pam and a girlfriend made the first three-day drive up North in about five days because they got so lost. Soon after, McHann called and said she had more dogs with adopters up North, if Pam was willing to go again. She and Kyle made that second trip in his pickup truck. “It was pretty redneck,” he told me. “The camper top didn’t match the truck, and we had eight dogs inside going up to Boston. But that started the snowball rolling.”
Demand grew, so the Petersons rented a van that let them take twenty dogs at a time. This was a major idea, as there were no companies doing transports of rescue dogs on a large, multistate scale. Eventually they bought a bigger truck with a camper top. (That one was swanky—it matched.) Then they bought a small horse trailer that held about forty dogs. Demand rose again. They got a second horse trailer that could hold sixty dogs. Then they got another one of those to double their capacity. Their operation grew into what it is today: able to move nearly two hundred dogs in a single day.
The Petersons quickly realized that while the idea of moving rescued dogs was good, the way it was being done was sometimes bad. They were hearing all of those stories that I’d also heard when researching how best to transport Izzy and Summer— only they were hearing terrible versions that involved people trying to move far more than a couple of dogs at a time.
“When we first started out,” Kyle recalls, “I called the U.S. Department of Agriculture to get licensed. It took them a month to figure out how to even classify us. We realized right away that you could follow all of the rules out there, and you still would not be working in the best interest of the dogs. There was nothing that said the dogs even had to be walked or given constant access to water or be in a climate-controlled space. So we not only became the first rescue transport to get certified by the USDA, but we also became the first to impose our own rules on the rescuers who wanted the dogs moved. We tried to pioneer the industry while we were flying by the seat of our pants.”
One of the unsettling things the Petersons noticed was that a lot of dogs were being transported straight from the shelters in the South to the foster homes or adopters like me up North, taken straight from the cages without getting the kinds of basic shots and sterilizations that Blue, Izzy, and Summer had all received. The Petersons quickly realized that was a health problem— not just with dogs like Blue suspected of having communicable rashes like ringworm, but also with everything from the parvo virus to mange. They now refuse to transport any dog who has not been out of a shelter and with a rescue for at least two weeks. They find that’s enough time for the dogs to get all their vaccines, as well as for the dogs to have settled down from the shelter experience so that they’re not stressed out when they go into the transport, which can be stressful enough to make even a healthy dog sick.
“We also don’t transport any dog unless it’s spayed or neutered,” Kyle told me. “That’s another one of our own rules. We don’t want to be in the business of transporting the dog overpopulation problem. We want to be in the business of helping to end the dog overpopulation problem.”
While it never occurred to me that driving Izzy and Summer across multiple state lines might put me in violation of any laws, the Petersons are now spending a fair amount of time worrying about that very issue. They are beginning to see some lawmakers creating barriers that make it harder to transport rescue dogs. Lawmakers in the North are trying to make sense of the sea change that is occurring with shelter dogs, and they have some serious concerns, including the transport of disease.
Behind those legitimate concerns that lawmakers have, though, are substantial lobbying dollars for breeders and pet stores.
“There are a lot of people doing it wrong,” Kyle told me. “They’ll move dogs in a van without health certificates, park in a Walmart parking lot, and just start selling dogs out of the van without any rabies shots, spay/neuter surgeries, nothing. The ones they can’t sell, they dump in the local shelters. So you’re spreading problems and disease, and the Northern states are right to try to stop that. But we also are now seeing something else in states like Connecticut, which just passed a law that was sponsored and written by a breeders’ association. They feel they are not selling as many purebred dogs because people in the North are starting to adopt more mutts. The pet stores and the breeders feel the rescue groups are eclipsing them in, well, sales. So they are taking their lobbyists and money into the government to get these laws passed that have only to do with rescues. The one that just passed in Connecticut has a pet-store exemption. It’s that blatant.”
I looked up Connecticut House Bill 5368, and Kyle’s description was surprisingly accurate. The law clearly outlines how anyone who transports a dog into the state must register with the state Department of Agriculture, have each dog examined by a state-licensed veterinarian, and notify local zoning officials before offering the dog for sale, adoption, or transfer—unless the dog is being delivered to a pet shop to be sold.
That seemed like a ridiculous exemption to me, plus an awful lot of requirements for somebody like me, who wanted to take two dogs named Izzy and Summer to my own home while a rescue group found them permanent adopters. It seemed incredible to me, the lengths to which special interests will go to ensure that dogs like Blue remain mired in places where they have a 5-percent chance of survival, to protect the ability to make money off the lives of other dogs and animals.
“What is sad about laws like these is that it will do nothing more than stop some rescue groups from using proper transports,” Kyle says. “They’ll just sneak the dogs in to the families that are willing to save them. They want to save these dogs, so they load them up and drive them wherever.”
That’s exactly what I did with Izzy and Summer. I didn’t think for a moment that I might be doing something wrong. I just thought they were really nice dogs who didn’t deserve to be asphyxiated in a gas chamber, and I wanted to help them the same way that other people had so generously helped to save Blue.
Izzy, I learned by reading her paperwork, was about six months old. I could immediately tell that she was as playful as any puppy I’d ever known. She was listed as a flat-coated retriever mix, and she had adorably fuzzy hairs sticking up all around her face, as if she’d just rolled around on a carpet and jumped up fluttering with static cling. She looked healthy and had a super-shiny coat, and she came right to me with her tail wagging. Her foster mom in North Carolina had loved her so much that she sent a bag full of treats and toys and food, as well as a long note that instructed me to contact her if the northbound transport didn’t work out. The only reason she’d given Izzy up is that the dog needed a big fenced yard for running, and while she didn’t have one, I did. Under no circumstances did she want sweet Izzy ending up back in a shelter. She would drive the hundreds of miles herself to come and collect Izzy if necessary, she promised.
Summer, on the other hand, arrived in my care with as little paperwork and history as Blue. She was listed for adoption as a petite black Labrador, which I suppose is rescue-speak for “cute little black dog we have no idea what else to call.” She was probably at least a year or two old and was sadly skinny, so much so that I thought she may have recently been left tied to a tree and starved. Later, I’d learn that she was more likely a stray, one who had arrived at the shelter with a litter of four puppies. They had all been adopted after suckling her weight right out of her, and she’d been left to die. Summer was confused about eating food out of a bowl at first, but she would sit beautifully on command and gulp treats from my hand like a well-practiced beggar. She mostly just wanted to sit in a way where she was constantly touching me, which seemed to make her feel safe.
I put Izzy in the crate behind my driver’s seat and Summer in the crate behind the passenger seat. As I drove north toward Interstate 95, I had a box of dog treats up front with me. Every twenty minutes or so, I would slip one treat apiece through each of the crate bars, to make the dogs feel safer during the first part of the drive. I kept the volume on the radio low. I made a point of talking to Izzy and Summer in a calm, soothing voice.
Izzy seemed just fine and lay down in her crate to take a nap, but I soon smelled that something was amiss in Summer’s crate. At first I thought it was nervous gas, but then the stench got so bad that I had to roll down all of the windows. I pulled off the highway at the first possible chance so that I could stop the car and see what was wrong.
In the gas-station parking lot, I opened Summer’s crate. She had gotten so scared that she urinated and defecated everywhere. She hadn’t just soiled the towels on the bottom; the crate looked like a filthy monkey cage at the zoo. There was poop all over the crate walls, somehow on the crate ceiling, and even on Summer herself.
It was at that moment that I realized I’d thought ahead to bring dog treats, bottled water, and a few extra clean towels, but not to bring any cleaning supplies or dog shampoo. I had thought that one of the dogs might vomit, but I hadn’t anticipated having to wipe poop off the plastic crate’s walls or give either of the dogs a bath on the side of the road.
Since I was alone in the gas-station parking lot with Izzy and Summer, now both out of the crates and on their leashes, I had to rely on the goodwill of a stranger to help. I explained my situation to a woman who was walking inside the station’s convenience store to buy a soda, handed her a twenty-dollar bill, and asked her to please bring back any cleaning supplies she could find. She could have easily pocketed the money and snuck out of town without me noticing, but she kindly returned with paper towels and spray cleaner—and she brought a few extra people in tow. All of the people petted Summer and Izzy while I cleaned out the cage, and two of them asked me where they could look online for adoption information about dogs like Summer and Izzy in their own areas.